Quitting a Place

            There’s one waitress in Kaycee, Wyoming, where I stop for breakfast on my way to Montana.  Last time it was Colorado I moved and before that Pennsylvania, Maine, and Vermont.  Every two Septembers, I quit a place like summer quits somewhere that gets cold quick.  Some people are sad when I go, others aren’t, and most don’t know.

            “What’s good about this town?” I look up at the waitress.  Her hair is brassy like she bleached it herself at home maybe hoping it would turn out better this time. She’s in her thirties and has been average in everything from sports to breaking horses to sex.  And tips.  I can tell by the way she tries good posture for only a second or two.

            “Well, umm, there’s a pretty park down the street.”  Her words tip toe across the table where I sit, still looking up at her and her brassy hair and still not ordering coffee or eggs. 

She tries again –– her words as hurried now as bare feet pattering across a floor from the bedroom to the bathroom in winter. “And every Friday we’ve got a different flavor pie,” she says. “Last week was cherry. This week peach. People liked the cherry more than the peach.”

            I look around for the people, but the diner’s near empty as an old man’s refrigerator –– only one rancher in the corner drinking milk and burping now and again, unsmiling, as if a smile would make his face crack and crumble like the brittle dirt of the plains.  Just like combing his hair would be useless because the wind that slicks it in all directions is constant.  He meets my gaze with eyes half shut like he’s had to squint against that wind and the dust so many years they’ve stayed that way. 

I turn to the window –– nobody on the road outside the Grace Mission Baptist Church where a sign staked into the lawn reads: “The Most Powerful Position is On Your Knees” so someone in Kaycee either has a sense of humor or hasn’t been young in too long.

            “Does it snow a lot in winter?” I look back up at the waitress.

            “Sometimes snow,” she says. “But sometimes no snow, just wind and cold.”

            “Bone–cracking cold like in Vermont?” I ask and laugh.

            “I’ve lived here all my life so I don’t know what kind of cold it is,” she says. Try to get her to smile; it’s hard. 

            “You’ve never left?”

            “I went to school in Casper for a spell, and we visit my brother in South Dakota on Thanksgiving.”  She draws her notepad slow from her apron.  Her silver wedding band is tarnished and plain and her knuckles raw like she’s been handling things in cold weather and water.           

            Her pen, positioned to write down my order, closes the conversation now, softly, like closing a door to either not bother or be bothered –– I can’t tell which –– and I’m left on the other side of that door.  Later, while unpacking the bags I’ve opened and closed so many times their zippers are broken, I’ll talk more but to myself.

            “I guess I’ll have the Country Breakfast eggs over hard.” 

            “The eggs come scrambled,” she says, her words still tip toeing. It’s as if she’s never had anything to be loud about her entire life.  Maybe it’s that the loudest sound in Wyoming is the silence as wind roars through open space that splays across so many miles you lose knowing where you’ve come from, where you’re going, and why. 

            “That’s fine,” I say and turn in the handwritten menu, not smiling, not looking up this time, feeling lonelier than I’ve felt in years –– like my desire to go to South Dakota’s Badlands, empty and inexplicable.

Waiting for my eggs, I look out the window at the sunlight rolling out a new day over the dirt road and the church and the plains like a carpet. What makes a person never quit a place for somewhere with more than a pretty park and good cherry pie? What makes the one waitress in Kaycee content living always in a state where the biggest pastimes are Fireworks and God?  Never bothering or being bothered?  Never knowing a word for “different.”

            After breakfast, I’ll continue north to Montana while sky somersaults for miles on both sides of me. I’ve left Colorado to see new clouds tumbling over new mountains with names like the Tobacco Roots, Bangtails, and Crazies. To maybe meet a man with useful skills who knows how to build and fix things you can touch and things you can’t.  To maybe find new writing material in the crevices of hardscrabble, rural life out west.  But then nothing that belongs to “maybe” is real yet.  And, in this moment, what feels most real are this waitress and rancher who get up at dawn each morning before even the earth has dressed itself.  Their connection to the land is vital and has little to do with a view. And while they may never know the word for “different,” they know always where to find the people they love.

            She returns with my Country Breakfast and sets it in front of me, pauses, then says, “So what brings you this way?”

            I open my mouth to explain, but close it as the rancher tosses a few coins on his table, stands up and clomps across the diner to the door.  He stops, turns around and calls out to the waitress, “Tell your husband I’ll have that heater for automatic watering up and running for him again by Friday.”  Then he almost smiles when he adds, “Can’t wait for the new pie flavor. Don’t say what it is though.” 

She nods her goodbye and turns back to me once the door slams behind him.   “It’s always something.”  She straightens the sugar dispenser on my table. “So what did you say brings you this way?”

            I glance outside beyond the church at the solemn stretch of orange–purple land that doesn’t open its mouth to really explain why or what.  Silent, now, words suddenly inadequate to describe the texture of the western land and people that draw me to it, I wonder, as a writer, who or what am I if stripped of language? And if, by quitting so many places, I also quit developing real relationships with the land and its people that give me a voice, quiet or loud, but that never uses the word “maybe”?

            I look up at the waitress like maybe she knows.